School Notes: School of Architecture
July/August 2025

New ceremonial mace

The School of Architecture debuted a new ceremonial mace, redesigned to showcase the school’s twenty-first-century design and technical expertise, at Yale’s 324th commencement on May 19. 

The new mace, designed by fabrication lab faculty Timothy Newton ’07MArch and Nathan Burnell, was constructed using the school’s own facilities, including CNC mills, 3D printers, and the metal shop. The symbolism of various components of the mace celebrates the histories of the university and the school. At the top, Paul Rudolph Hall, the world-famous brutalist masterpiece that houses the School of Architecture, is modeled in 3D-printed aluminum, produced from an intricate digital model of the building. Immediately below that, a model of an octagonal column forms the neck of the mace. The original column it is modeled after sits on the second floor of Paul Rudolph Hall and was salvaged from a building designed by Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect. Four School of Architecture shields sit around the neck, and a miniature carving of Minerva—modeled after the plaster cast statue that overlooks the building’s fourth-floor studios—here adorns the mace in cast silver. The staff is made from fluted ebonized ash wood, carved to recall the corrugated concrete walls of Paul Rudolph Hall, and carved in sections using a rotary-axis CNC mill with a profile that tapers from square at the top to a circle at the base. 

The new mace replaces one designed by dean Cesar Pelli when the school was first made independent in the mid-1970s. Read more about the mace and see a photo in the magazine’s Light & Verity section.